Field Journal

Recovery Through Purposeful Adventure
Words: Richard Breeden // Photography: Sam Dugon // Richard Baybutt

Unlike many people reading this I haven’t spent my life in the outdoors, connecting with nature through adventure. In fact, I’m more than a little new to this world.

When I was 12, my father, David – a beloved, avid, passionate, experienced, and hilarious climber, mountaineer, brother, partner, son, and friend – went up into the Glyders in Snowdonia for the last time. In the years to come, the male figures in my life fell away as if someone were chucking stones at bottles on a wall. I had no-one to look up to, and when you’re that age, you don’t really know what grief is. You don’t know how to tell girls you like them, let alone what it means to be without a guide. I felt so incredibly alone. Not only did I not know how to process what I was feeling, I didn’t know who I could share anything with.

The situations the world had presented me with meant that the next 20-odd years were a blur. Caffeine, booze, nicotine, and substances at the more intense end of that spectrum meant that there wasn’t much beyond the next opportunity to get so off my head that I had no need for emotion, feeling, memory, or any of that shit. Yeah, it was fun. Or at least I think it was. I worked in outdoor events, indoor events, in the music industry, on building sites; even drove lorries for longer than I ever thought I would. I spent a long time not working at all, just bouncing from one party to the next seeing how I got on. I lived in Sheffield for five years, the heart of the Peak District 15 minutes from my door on Ecclesall Road. I drove out there once for a rave in the middle of the woods. Hobbies? Yeah, I had hobbies, but they all revolved around that need to escape. The truth of it is that I wasn’t really there. I was somewhere else, looking for something else. But the world I had created for myself was never going to provide it.

Dad had been a keen cyclist. It’s a passion he instilled in me, and something I think connects me to him even now. I don’t need to tell you that I didn’t exactly share his passions in those blurry years, but I’m pretty sure that my uncle Keith (Dad’s brother) knew it was in there somewhere.

We each hired a Trek Remedy and went to Coed y Brenin for my first proper bike ride. The weather was awful. I walked half of it, and you’d be forgiven for thinking I’d never do that again, but the opposite happened.

It was by no means a switch being flipped. My problems weren’t solved all of a sudden on what could only be described as quite a shit day out at a trail centre. But I did buy a bike, and a good one at that. It took time. Many an MTB trip was more focused on being off our heads than the biking, but eventually the scales tipped, and in time the concept of missing a ride because of a comedown was never something I wanted to do. I got to the point where I’d much rather be soaking wet, with a puncture and no repair kit in the middle of nowhere without any phone signal than down the pub all weekend. I’d finally found that something I’d been looking for – the escape I’d been seeking. The thrill I’d been chasing down a bag, bottle, or rizla was finally something real that, for the most part, wasn’t killing me.

And that’s how it was for a while. I’d escape Cambridgeshire for the hills as often as I could (being a mountain biker in the Fens is some task). I’d escape my reality – no real drive, no real direction, purpose, or goals – for a weekend on the bike in Wales with the lads. And it was bloody brilliant. I had turned a corner, but I still didn’t have a clue what I was doing, really. I was just escaping, ignoring reality in favour of pleasure, so in many ways nothing had changed. When I got back on Monday, I just looked forward to the next weekend.

Although I was still on the hunt for something, I’d lit a fire in myself. I knew that this newfound awe I had discovered was a phenomenon that I needed to share, but I wasn’t sure of anything, so I just kept thinking. I kept talking to anyone who would listen. This is where my Purposeful Adventure really began. Through those conversations, what used to be an escape turned into reality, and when I found myself outside I appreciated the more-than-human world more and more with every breath I took – noticing different species, different weather systems, trails, and the wild places they took me to, with a purpose and intensity unlike anything legal I can describe. The different ways in which the human condition reacts to the outdoors, taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight, all became more intense as I grew closer to nature. And I relied on nature almost entirely for what I now know was a process of recovery.

I want to help people – and not just people like me, with similar problems, but everyone. A man much wiser than me once said ‘Why can’t good people be better?’ and I’ll remember that forever. I made it my mission to make prevention better than cure, and stopped at nothing to make that my day-to-day reality. It is clear to me now that I had experienced serious mental-health problems throughout those blurry years. Textbooks say this means you need therapy, and maybe that’s true for some, but I never had any of that. I just had myself, biking, the places it took me to, and the people I went with. I didn’t see myself as having a problem with my mental health, but with my experience as a human – my overall well-being was in jeopardy, and the answer to that was a holistic approach with outdoor physical activity and a connection to the places and people around me at its core.

I believe that you make your own luck. So when the opportunity arose to be a part of Trash Free Trails, I felt more relief than surprise – relief that I had been talking sense all this time. I knew that someone would hear me eventually. That person just happened to be Dom Ferris, founder and MD. The rest is history. Purposeful Adventure is as much a fundamental part of me as an individual as it is integral to our mission and woven into the fabric of the organisation.